Embryos, individuals, and persons: an argument against embryo creation and research

One strategy for arguing that it should be legally permissible to create human embryos, or to use of spare human embryos, for scientific research purposes involves the claim that such embryos cannot be persons because they are not human individuals while twinning may yet take place. Being a human individual is considered to be by most people a necessary condition for being a human person. I argue first that such an argument against the personhood of embryos must be rationally conclusive if their destruction in public places such as laboratories is to be countenanced. I base this argument on a popular understanding of the role that the notion of privacy plays in abortion law. I then argue that such arguments against personhood are not rationally conclusive. The claim that the early embryos is not a human individual is not nearly as obvious as some assert.     

The Look of Love

I begin to suggest an alternative to the notion of vision based in alienation and hostility put forth by Jean‐Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, andfacques Lacan. I diagnose this alienating vision as a result of a particular alienating notion of space presupposed by their theories. I develop lrigaray's comments about light and air to suggest an alternative notion of space that opens up the possibility that vision connects us to others rather than alienates us from them.     

Dworkin and Casey on abortion

This article responds to two important recent treatments of abortion rights. I will mainly discuss Ronald Dworkin's recent writings concerning abortion: his article "Unenumerated rights: whether and how Roe should be overruled," and his book Life's Dominion. In these writings Dworkin presents a novel view of what the constitutional and moral argument surronding abortion is really about. Both debates actually turn, he argues, on the question of how to interpret the widely shared idea that human life is sacred. At the heart of the abortion debate is the essentially religious notion that human life has value which transcends its value to any particular person; abortion is therefore at bottom a religious issue. Dworkin hopes to use this analysis to show that the religion clauses of the First Amendment provide a "textual home" for a woman's right to choose abortion. I wish to scrutinize this suggestion here; I want to probe the precise consequences for abortion rights of such an understanding of their basis. I will argue that the consequences are more radical than Dworkin seems to realize. The other work I will examine here is the important 1992 Supreme Court decision on abortion, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The controlling opinion in that case, written jointly by Justices Kennedy, O'Connor, and Souter, strongly reaffirmed Roe v. Wade, but also upheld most of the provisions of a Pennsylvania statute that had mandated various restrictions on abortion. The justices' basis for upholding these restictions was their introduction of a new constitutional standard for abortion regulations, an apparently weaker standard than those that had governed previous Supreme Court abortion decisions. I think there is a flaw in Casey's new constitutional test for abortion regulations, and I will explain, when we turn to Casey, what it is and why it bears a close relation to Dworkin's reluctance to carry his argument as far as it seems to go.     

What Is Trust?

Trust is difficult to define. Instead of doing so, I propose that the best way to understand the concept is through a genealogical account. I show how a root notion of trust arises out of some basic features of what it is for humans to live socially, in which we rely on others to act cooperatively. I explore how this concept acquires resonances of hope and threat, and how we analogically apply this in related but different contexts. The genealogical account explains both why the notion has such value for us and why it is difficult to define.     

No Luck With Knowledge? On a Dogma of Epistemology

Current epistemological orthodoxy has it that knowledge is incompatible with luck. More precisely: Knowledge is incompatible with epistemic luck (of a certain, interesting kind). This is often treated as a truism which is not even in need of argumentative support. In this paper, I argue that there is lucky knowledge. In the first part, I use an intuitive and not very developed notion of luck to show that there are cases of knowledge which are “lucky” in that sense. In the second part, I look at philosophical conceptions of luck (modal and probabilistic ones) and come to the conclusion that knowledge can be lucky in those senses, too. I also turns out that a probabilistic notion of luck can help us see in what ways a particular piece of knowledge or belief can be lucky or not lucky.     

Cosmopolitanism and its Predicaments

The aim of my paper is to show the discussion concerning the idea of cosmopolitan society. I intend to examine the structure and content of the argumentation which put into question the very notion of cosmopolitanism, as well as the contemporary content of this concept. I will look at nationalistic discourse as presented, for instance, by Gertrude Himmelfarb, which puts emphasis on national values as an indispensable part of group and individual identity. On the other hand, I am going to analyze left-wing evaluation of cosmopolitanism (for instance, that of Chantal Mouffe) as an ideologically motivated attempt to hide the real contradictions of the contemporary world. Finally, I will prove that these critiques cannot undermine the concept of cosmopolitanism, but they force us to rethink a way in which cosmopolitan society can be achieved. If cosmopolitan society is to emerge, we need to reconstruct the idea of democracy and the notion of multi-cultural pluralistic society. I propose such rethinking of cosmopolitanism by the introduction of the notion of “dialogical cosmopolitanism,” which refers to M.M. Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue and G.H. Mead’s idea of “taking the role of the other.”     

Essentialism and Nonnaturalist Normative Supervenience

In this essay I defend a kind of nonnaturalist normative supervenience, grounded in the essences of things. Essentialist theories, in fact, give us the tools to treat the nexus of normative supervenience as a nexus of metaphysical necessity, holding between the normative and the natural. In this context, essentialist grounding provides an explanation of normative supervenience that allows us to keep together both supervenience and nonnaturalism. Moreover, to achieve this significant result, I do not make use of hybrid properties, which are both normative and natural. Rather, I endeavour to show that the notion of hybrid property is based on an erroneous notion of grounding.     

Regendering the U.S. Abortion Debate

This paper originated in a conference presentation with my colleague Michael Tooley, at which we were both asked to re-evaluate articles about abortion that each of us had written over twenty years earlier. While Tooley and I both contended that abortion should be legally unrestricted, there were striking differences in the style and content of our respective arguments. Contemplating these differences has reinforced my own belief in the importance of emphasizing the centrality of gender when discussing abortion. Since gender as we know it is a system of dominance as well as difference (MacKinnon 1987), I take this to mean that contemporary discussions of abortion must address the relationship between abortion access and the social status of women. My early article addressed this relationship to some extent, but the present paper will raise a number of additional gender issues that the early article did not mention.     

Lost in Eden: Dementia From Paradise

I look at dementia from an eschatological perspective through personal experience as I supported my husband through his journey into Alzheimer’s disease. Building on the notion of a monastic garden, I draw from the contemplatives to understand my own “kairos” moment that changed my perspective on the way church and other providers offer care. Comparing the church to a garden, I argue that people with dementia are priest-bearing sacraments in whose faces God is seen. Looking into the faces of those with dementia, these priests shepherd us to recognize our illusions about life calling us to greater humility.     

Scientific styles,plain truth,and truthfulness

Ian Hacking loosely defines a “style of scientific thinking” as a “way to find things out about the world” characterised by five hallmark features of a number of scientific template styles. Most prominently, these are autonomy and “self-authentication”: a scientific style of thinking, according to Hacking, is not good because it helps us find out the truth in some domain, it itself defines the criteria for truth-telling in its domain. I argue that Renaissance medicine, Mediaeval “demonology”, and magical thinking pass muster as scientific according to Hacking’s criteria. However, application of these thought styles to the entities they introduce generates statements that logically imply a set of “ordinary” statements – or what Bernard Williams calls “plain truths” – which, contra the claims of autonomy and self-authentication, allows styles to be assessed from a style-independent perspective. Using Williams’ notion of plain truth, I show that Renaissance medicine, demonology, and magical thinking, in reality issue in many plain falsehoods. This confronts us with what I call Hacking’s dilemma: either define stricter necessary conditions on being a style of scientific thinking, or concede that some styles albeit scientific are not as good at finding things out about the world as others. I make three suggestions to deal with the dilemma.     

Reasonability,normativity, and the cosmopolitan imagination: Arendt,Korsgaard, and Rawls

In this essay I consider the normative implications of the notion of reasonability for the construction of an idea of public reason that is cosmopolitan in scope. First, I consider the argument for the distinction between reason and reasonability in the work of Sibley and Rawls. Second, I evaluate the normative implications of reasonability through a consideration of Korsgaard's recent work. Third, I argue for a notion of reasonability that moves us beyond a Kantian concept of autonomy through a consideration of the relationship between reasonability and judgment vis-à-vis Arendt's work on Kant's Third Critique. Finally, I argue for a cosmopolitan appropriation of the notion of reasonability based on Kant's notion of the aesthetic idea. The latter argument relaxes the bonds of public reason, moving us beyond the domain of ethnocentricism.     

Conceptual engineering for mathematical concepts

In this paper I investigate how conceptual engineering applies to mathematical concepts in particular. I begin with a discussion of Waismann’s notion of open texture, and compare it to Shapiro’s modern usage of the term. Next I set out the position taken by Lakatos which sees mathematical concepts as dynamic and open to improvement and development, arguing that Waismann’s open texture applies to mathematical concepts too. With the perspective of mathematics as open-textured, I make the case that this allows us to deploy the tools of conceptual engineering in mathematics. I will examine Cappelen’s recent argument that there are no conceptual safe spaces and consider whether mathematics constitutes a counterexample. I argue that it does not, drawing on Haslanger’s distinction between manifest and operative concepts, and applying this in a novel way to set-theoretic foundations. I then set out some of the questions that need to be engaged with to establish mathematics as involving a kind of conceptual engineering. I finish with a case study of how the tools of conceptual engineering will give us a way to progress in the debate between advocates of the Universe view and the Multiverse view in set theory.     

Truth,omniscience, and the Knower

Conclusion Let us sum up.The paradox of the Knower poses a direct and formal challenge to the coherence of common notions of knowledge and truth. We've considered a number of ways one might try to meet that challenge: propositional views of truth and knowledge, redundancy or operator views, and appeal to hierarchy of various sorts. Mere appeal to propositions or operators, however, seems to be inadequate to the task of the Knower, at least if unsupplemented by an auxiliary recourse to hierarchy. But the cost of hierarchy appears to be an abandonment of any notion of all truth or of omniscience. What the contradictions of the Knower seem to demand, then, is at least an abandonment of these.As noted in the introduction, the argument is complicated enough that one must be wary of dogmatic and precipitate conclusions. One may legitimately wonder whether some new response, or some variation on an old one, will yet offer a way out.Far too often, however, it is asked what has gone wrong with paradox rather than what paradox may have to teach us. What the Knower may have to teach us, I think, is that there really can be no coherent notion of all truth and really can be no coherent notion of omniscience. In its own way that conclusion is perhaps as humbling as is any traditional notion of God.I am grateful to C. Anthony Anderson, Robert F. Barnes, David Boyer, Tyler Burge, Evan W. Conyers, and Allen Hazen for correspondence and discussion regarding basic ideas, and owe a special debt to David Boyer and Evan W. Conyers for careful criticism of earlier drafts.     

Cognitive Metaphor Theory and the Metaphysics of Immediacy

One of the core tenets of cognitive metaphor theory is the claim that metaphors ground abstract knowledge in concrete, first‐hand experience. In this paper, I argue that this grounding hypothesis contains some problematic conceptual ambiguities and, under many reasonable interpretations, empirical difficulties. I present evidence that there are foundational obstacles to defining a coherent and cognitively valid concept of “metaphor” and “concrete meaning,” and some general problems with singling out certain domains of experience as more immediate than others. I conclude from these considerations that whatever the facts are about the comprehension of individual metaphors, the available evidence is incompatible with the notion of an underlying conceptual structure organized according to the immediacy of experience.     

Fatherhood and Child Support: Do Men Have a Right to Choose?

ABSTRACT My primary aim is to call into question an influential notion of paternal responsibility, namely, that fathers owe support to their children due to their causal responsibility for their existence. I argue that men who impregnate women unintentionally, and despite having taken preventative measures, do not owe child support to their children as a matter of justice; their children have no right against them for support. I argue for this on the basis of plausible principles of responsibility which have been used to defend abortion rights. I then consider the morally relevant differences between men and women, arguing that while in some cases these differences may justify differential treatment, their import should not be overstated — in many cases, the burden of child support will be too great to impose justly on fathers. This conclusion is not as undesirable as it may seem: I suggest feminist considerations in favour of revising the notion of paternal responsibility and consider alternative arrangements of child support.     

Plotinus on the Inner Sense

Recently, there has been a growing interest in ancient views on consciousness and particularly in their influence on medieval and early modern philosophers. Here I suggest a new interpretation of Plotinus’s account of consciousness which, if correct, may help us to reconsider his role in the history of the notion of the inner sense. I argue that, while explaining how our divided soul can be a unitary subject of the states and activities of its parts, Plotinus develops an original account of consciousness that appeals to an inner sense. In contrast to ‘the outer senses’, which perceive sensible things out there in the world, this sense, for him, perceives the activities of the parts of our soul, thus enabling us to be conscious of them as a single subject. I suggest that Plotinus devises his account of this psychic power in the light of Alexander of Aphrodisias’s interpretation of the Aristotelian ‘common sense’. Since in Alexander the ‘common sense’ enables us to be conscious as a single subject of sensations from different modalities, Plotinus uses it as a model to explain how we can be the conscious subject of all the states and activities of our soul.     

Educating Hopes

Acknowledging the negative impact poverty and violence can have on the educational process, I explore ways in which a pragmatic interpretation of hope can guide us in formulating preventive and responsive measures that are not intrusive on the normal curriculum. I draw on key pragmatic ideas presented by John Dewey to emphasize the habits central to a pragmatic theory of hope. Equally important is the notion of a community of hope that fosters the development of hope’s habits. A hopeful pedagogy enables us to fund students with habits that help them resist the disconnection and despair that can come from living and learning amid impoverished or violent conditions. I argue that teachers can emphasize hope’s relevance to achieving the goals of the curriculum; they can also promote students’ self-knowledge through personal narratives that identify past accomplishments and explore possible means to desired goods. To begin ameliorating the tenacious conditions that foster poverty and violence, we need to look beyond the confines of the classroom and school to the resources and coordinated efforts made possible by the larger community. A pragmatic interpretation thus focuses our attention on individual and communal habits that help us secure desired goods. My discussion demonstrates at least some of the ways in which hope is a valuable resource for actively responding to circumstances that impede the educational process.     

Kierkegaard’s Notion of a Divine Name and the Feasibility of Universal Love

Kierkegaard's well‐known analysis of the self, in the first part of his work The Sickness unto Death (1849), presents, even if only in passing, the somewhat enigmatic notion of “divine name.” In this article I offer an interpretation of Kierkegaard's analysis and suggest that the notion of a divine name be understood as expressing the conception of human beings as possessing (what I call) “individual essence.” I further demonstrate that it is this quality that makes a human being a self, namely, the individual that he or she is. In addition to defending the exegetical and substantial plausibility of this conception, I show how it opens the way to affirming the feasibility of universal love.     

Grounding Nominalism

The notion of grounding has gained increasing acceptance among metaphysicians in recent years. In this paper, I argue that this notion can be used to formulate a very attractive version of (property) nominalism, a view that I call ‘grounding nominalism’. Simplifying somewhat, this is the view that all properties are grounded in things. I argue that this view is coherent and has a decisive advantage over competing versions of nominalism: it allows us to accept properties as real, while fully accommodating nominalist intuitions. Finally, I defend grounding nominalism against several seemingly troublesome objections.